Monster of the Week is an urban fantasy/horror tabletop RPG designed by Michael Sands, self-published in 2012 and picked up by Evil Hat Productions for a revised edition in 2015. It's Powered by the Apocalypse and it wears its influences openly: Buffy, Supernatural, The X-Files. You play Hunters. Every session (or arc of sessions) is a Mystery: a monster, a countdown clock, and a city of bystanders, gossipers, meddlers, and whatnot.

You pick an archetype from playbooks — The Chosen, The Divine, The Monstrous, The Spooky; that pick tells the table who you are and why you hunt. Expansions like Codex of Worlds and Codex: Apocrypha add more playbooks, Team playbooks, and settings on top of the core book.

Occulted KC is my weekly, IRL Monster of the Week game set in and around real Kansas City. No fantasy metro, real 'hoods, the West Bottoms, Grandview, Kessler Park, the IRL KC Metro PD. Grounding the fiction in places at least one person at the table actually knows has been the single biggest force-multiplier for prep and the table experience.

The premise came out of Session Zero. Going in, I had a vague Fringe-meets-Dandadan shape and a plan to eventually blame all the weirdness on Jack Parsons — real-life rocket scientist, JPL co-founder, and occultist. Something got opened in Kansas City. It can't be closed. Everyone since has been operating on corrupted assumptions. This would be the throughline, the Ur-text. Then the players picked playbooks, answered the Hx (history) questions —which I love about MotW and Apocalypse World. The actual premise assembled itself: a KC Cryptozoological Society, a siren loose in the city, a world-ending prophecy tied to one Hunter, a wellness support group as the team's "home" base. I used all of it within the first two sessions. Easy GM reps.

Three playbooks picked at Session Zero and have anchored the whole campaign.

Eleanor — The Flake. The Flake is the conspiracy theorist everybody thinks is unwell right up until they're proven right — sharp, paranoid, and built to connect dots nobody else can see. Eleanor brought a KC Cryptozoological Society obsession and (memorably) a literal gun closet.

Michael Lewis — The Mundane. No powers, no Weird — just a normal dude with maxed Charm, a deep luck pool, and a habit of getting experience by wandering into things he shouldn't. Michael was Eleanor's best friend before Blake pulled him into the city's occult side. People just gosh darn like him!

Blake — The Curse Eater. A Codex: Apocrypha playbook — Blake consumes curses directly, absorbing evil magic at the cost of a rising corruption track. His Hx tied him to a world-threatening curse he's fated to eventually swallow whole.

A few sessions in, the table added a Team playbook from the Codex of Worlds line — the mechanical and fictional glue that explains why these three specific people hunt together, plus dedicated moves for the team's specialty. We picked Hauntbusters! A team built for Hunters who go after Haunts specifically — location-bound threats with their own agenda, born out of grief, obsession, or unfinished business rather than a body to punch.

Case #1 — Liminal Spaces (2 sessions): A stalled city bus, twelve vanished passengers, and a "black firetruck" mobile command unit staffed by people who are very official-looking but not actually official. The Hunters found a liminal space, fought and beat a cockatrice, and came away with more questions than answers: an unnamed agency cosplaying first responders, the possibly entangled siren, and a contact named Bennie who went rogue after a missed “Net Friends” roll.

Case #2 — Curse of the Frog Monsters (What About Bennie?) (about 4 sessions, ended unresolved). KCPD footage shows officers losing a fight to something frog-shaped near the river. The trail led straight back to Bennie, who'd turned two street toughs into a single frog monster using a curse the Hunters traced to a river spirit. The Hunters restored the victim instead of killing him — very on-brand for this group but the case hit Midnight on the countdown clock before Bennie could be run down. He's gone. And everyone at the table knows he's working something foul..

Case #3 — The Teapot Djinn (2-3 sessions) The Disciples, KC's local occult-adjacent gang, brought a "make-a-frog-monster" batch of Bennie's curse-tech to a beef with a rival crew — and someone brought a janky teapot that spit hellfire. A warehouse in South Grandview burned down, three bodies turned up charred, and a Fire Djinn came free of its vessel in the process. Tracey took the fall for the arson and called Eleanor for his one phone call, pulling the team in to investigate.

Interstitial - Here, I gave the players a whole session to do whatever. It was a nice space between cases. They had plenty of loose ends to pull on, and we could give the characters downtime and see them outside of a case. They chose to do a wellness check on Nora and another witness/victim from two earlier cases. They contacted the Disciples and two homeless occultists to form a "Bennie Watch Party." Then they raided Bennie’s downtown loft apartment.

Case #4 – The Paranormal Circus and the Curse Speakers. Here in Kansas City, we had the Paranormal Circus roll through town. A 'rated R' goth/burlesque affair. That was the inspiration for this case and the 'Curse Speakers' from the Tome of Mysteries. We discover these Curse Speakers have been organizing and taking out Curse Eaters, with the help of the circus's Fae ringmaster, Lou.

Case #5 — Found Paradise (final). Detective Vaughn's officer — Det. Common, a recurring face from earlier cases — goes missing for days, then calls in sounding happier than he's ever been: "You don't need to look for me anymore." The trail leads to a resealed quarry cave on Cliff Drive in Kessler Park — a fragment of Case #1's liminal breach that never fully closed, and has spent years quietly accumulating everyone's abandoned what-ifs and offering up utopia.

I have been away from IRL long-term games for too long. This crew is my long-time gaming buddy, Jeremiah; Maxwell, my son, and ....' Eleanor' —because I haven't asked her permission to call her out. We haven't gamed in this composition before. Eleanor has played a lot of D&D; Maxwell has played other games but not really PBTA. I picked Monster of the Week because it would be easy for Eleanor’s ‘after DnD’ game to grasp, but different. We could do anything from Supernatural to The X-Files, or Dandadan. I leaned heavily into "It's all Jack Parson's fault" when I needed "reasons"; everything else was hot from player decisions and rolls. I used the core MotW book, Tome of Mysteries, and Codex of Worlds. Printed out Google Maps and face cards. SOOO much stuff to pack into a campaign!

There is some GM work, session administration, I’d call it. I had to pace things. A case can span more than a session. And you can push it so it wraps in one. That'll be on you mostly. Cases can bleed into each other; in fact, it might be good if they do, especially if they don't get fully solved. Insert downtime between cases. I added a few days to a week of in-game time between cases, and let players fill in that as downtime. The Interstitial came about from that also, just letting the players have the session to address and close open loops, or just explore the setting sans case work.

Without hesitation, yes.🤘🏾 I'd do it mostly the same. Pick playbooks, play a session or two. Select Team playbook. Let the main antagonist develop organically from the table.

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